South Dundas has an extensive network of over 300 kilometres of roads, plus associated infrastructure like bridges, culverts, and guardrails, with road infrastructure being the largest budget item each year. Maintaining, repairing, and reconstructing those roads presents a difficult balance for council and administrative staff to manage: industrial versus residential; village streets versus rural roads. This is why having plans in place, such as a roads study and an asset management plan, is important. That is, until council and staff took a wrong turn, which they did on August 13.
At that council meeting, council approved a staff plan to repair Bath Road at the north end of Iroquois. South Dundas has savings from this year’s tender process to pay for this. Asphalt costs were $55 per tonne under the estimated price. This is a savings of about $185,000 on the capital roads plan; the Bath Road project will cost about $62,000.
The mistake by council was not in tackling road repairs with these savings, but in ignoring its own processes to determine which road should be repaired, and for choosing this specific road. There are no residential or commercial properties on Bath Road, it serves only two industries: GFL’s former Third High Farms bio-solids division and Quality Manufacturing. Staff described the section of Bath Road to be repaired as having “extreme truck traffic.” There is already a roads study, and a new one is coming this fall. This identifies roads most in need of repair. Bath Road was not on the current list.
There are many streets in South Dundas’ villages which are in worse shape than Bath Road, or even of the many rural roads that were resurfaced or repaired this year. There seems to be an aversion to repaving streets in South Dundas’ villages. Whether that is out of fear that underlying infrastructure such as water and sewer may also need replacing, or perhaps it is a bias against villages, we do not know. What we do know is that unless there is substantial spending from other levels of government on village infrastructure, South Dundas’ villages rarely get their streets repaved. South Dundas does not need to lower village speed limits as other municipalities have, since few vehicles can drive close to the current limit without risking significant suspension repairs.
SDG Counties already has a procedure for dealing with savings found in capital road work through its “Now Needs” roads list and a policy to take Transportation Department surpluses and commit those funds to a reserve to work through that list. South Dundas council should adopt a “Now Needs” policy to address the ever-growing list of streets that need work and put the savings from favourable road tendering into addressing that list. This will avoid council making the same mistakes as they did on August 13.
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